Uku basic concepts and glossary

• New Company Owners and Company Admins setting up Uku for the first time.
• New Company Members getting onboarded into a firm that already uses Uku.
• Anyone reading help articles who hits a term they have not seen before.

A Client is a company (or individual) your firm serves. Every piece of billable work in Uku is anchored to a client — tasks, invoices, contracts, documents, and notes all live on the client’s profile. Uku uses Client, never “Customer” or “Account”.

See: Add and edit clients, Understanding the client view.

A Contact is a person associated with a client (the bookkeeper’s main accountant, the company’s CEO, the AP clerk). Contacts are stored on the client and can have roles, custom fields, and email addresses for invoicing and AML.

See: Managing contacts.

A Task is a unit of work. Each task belongs to one client, has a status, a deadline, optional assignees, optional time entries, and an optional billing setup. Tasks are the smallest thing Uku tracks. UI action labels include Mark done, Postpone, and Move to Later.

See: Add and edit tasks, Task statuses.

A Workflow is the set of tasks attached to a single client (or to a single project). The Workflow tab on a client shows everything currently scheduled for that client — recurring monthly bookkeeping, quarterly VAT, ad-hoc requests. The legacy term “task plan” refers to the same thing; current UI uses Workflow.

See: How to use workflow templates.

A Workflow template is a reusable blueprint that creates many tasks at once when applied to a client or project. Templates encode the work patterns your firm repeats — annual accounts, monthly bookkeeping, payroll cycles. Templates can be created manually, uploaded from Excel, or cloned from existing templates.

See: How to use workflow templates, How to create project workflow templates.

A Topic is a category label you attach to tasks for grouping and filtering — for example “Bookkeeping”, “Payroll”, “VAT”. Topics power dashboard groupings, filters, and many BI Analytics breakdowns. Topics are not the same as task statuses or custom fields.

See: How to use topics.

A Project is a finite engagement with a defined end (an audit, a company setup, a one-off consulting brief). Some companies are configured for Events instead — same feature, different label. Project tasks are one-time only — recurring tasks are not supported on projects, only on the client itself.

See: Projects overview (if available), How to use workflow templates.

A Member is a person on your team who logs in to Uku. The sidebar item is Members (the URL is /users but the label is Members). Members are different from Contacts (people associated with a client) and different from Client Portal users (external users who only see the portal).

See: Manage members, Member profile tabs and what each one does.

A Recurrence is the rule that auto-repeats a task at a given cadence — monthly, quarterly, yearly, or a custom pattern. Only client-level tasks can be recurring; project tasks cannot recur. The kebab-menu action Create recurring task appears only on tasks that are not part of a project.

See: How to set up and manage recurring tasks.

A Custom field is a user-defined data field you add to clients, tasks, contacts, members, projects, or suppliers. Custom fields drive filters, BI breakdowns, AML records, and conditional billing logic. Different entity types have their own custom field configuration.

See: Client and contact custom fields.

A Bookmark is a saved combination of filters and grouping on the dashboard or another list view. Bookmarks let you switch between views like “My open tasks” and “All overdue VAT tasks” with one click.

See: How to use bookmarks.

Uku has two orthogonal permission systems. The UI labels both with the same bare words (“Admin” / “Member”), so help text always disambiguates with a prefix.

• Company role — what you can do company-wide (settings, subscription, member management). Set on the member’s profile via the Administrator checkbox. Three values: Company Owner (one per company), Company Admin, Company Member.
• Client permission — what you can do on a specific client (edit data, manage contacts, delete tasks). Set in the client’s Members tab. Two values: Client Admin and Client Member.

The two axes are independent. A Company Member can hold Client Admin permission on individual clients they are assigned to. A Company Admin does NOT automatically have Client Admin on every client.

A third, separate system applies to the Client Portal — external users with their own four-permission model (Client Read, Client Edit, Task Edit, Document Read). Portal users are not members.

See: Roles and permissions.

Plan	Audience	Includes
Free	Solo / very small	Limited single-person use
Team	Standard firm	Tasks, clients, workflows, billing, time tracking, monitoring, emails, Client Portal, AML, accounting integrations
Elite	Mature firm	Everything in Team plus BI Analytics, Capacity Planning, eSignatures, Public API, Budgets, Proposals, Documents (Drive/Dropbox/SharePoint), Workforce Management, Audit log

Never invent plans. Names like Pro, Premium, Enterprise, or Business are not Uku plans.

See: Uku plans explained.

• Settings & Apps — the configuration area, always referred to by its full name (never “Settings” alone).
• Mini Uku — the Chrome extension companion. Always “Mini Uku”.
• Magic Button — the keyboard-driven quick-action launcher.
• Flextime — the feature that tracks under-/over-worked hours against a member’s agreed hours. One word.
• eSignatures — lowercase e, capital S. Never “E-signatures”.
• Workforce Management — the HR-style member fields, notes, agreements, and vacations app.
• Anti Money Laundering (AML) — the AML feature on the client profile. Use full name on first mention, then AML.